Category Archives: digital literacy

Allison Brungard and Kristin Klucevsek offer the following preview of their chapter, “Reconstructing Scientific Literacy through Metaliteracy: Implications for Learning in a Post Truth World,” appearing in the forthcoming book, Metaliterate Learning for the Post-Truth World, edited by Thomas Mackey and Trudi Jacobson.

Science now exists in a wide range of digital contexts. Scientific information can be shared through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and user-generated communities such as YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, and Wikipedia. These platforms can help disseminate scientific information to the wider public, but they also can spread misconceptions and distortions. In our post-truth world, this has a strong impact on scientific literacy, with downstream implications for health, politics, and the environment. We also encounter effects of this post-truth world in our classrooms as we work to build stronger literacy skills with our students. The need for learners to critically examine and reflect on what they encounter in these participatory online environments is crucial. To improve scientific literacy, learners must develop the metacognitive processes necessary to discern fact from fiction. As teachers, we must re-examine competencies for scientific literacy in this post-truth, digital world.

In this chapter, we address the challenges of scientific literacy within the larger framework of metaliteracy. With an emphasis on the four domains of metaliterate learning, we align scientific process with metaliteracy competencies to enhance scientific literacy. We explore the impacts of current events and education on scientific literacy, as well as the relationship between social media and personal biases through which scientific facts can be misconstrued. We also focus on strategies for academic librarians and disciplinary faculty to infuse metaliterate objectives in their teaching, curriculum, and research. Reflective and participatory learning can move learners beyond the consumption of information and towards critical thinking, research, and writing. This encourages learners to also be content producers, with the ability to understand the most effective ways to use science in their daily lives

Thomas Palmer, M.S., Digital Media Lecturer from the Journalism Program at the University at Albany, SUNY, and Editorial Design Director / News Editor at the Times Union newspaper introduces you to his chapter in Metaliterate Learning in the Post-Truth World: When Stories and Pictures Lie Together — And You Don’t Even Know It.

The photo in the tweet triggers your path to deception in as little as 13 milliseconds. Your brain dedicates about 85% of its processing to make sense of this picture. Your comprehension of its text finally catches up, but you’ll likely believe the false claim merely because the image is present. Confirmation bias settles in. You have just fallen prey within seconds to the intersemiotic contextual misrepresentation of photojournalism — and you weren’t even aware. This targeted disinformation to manipulate you is a success. In this post-truth era, the weaponizing of legitimate photojournalism for political and social propaganda is easy and low tech. However, in this chapter metaliterate learners can develop judgment for identifying and exposing this malpractice to protect themselves and the public.

The relationship between text and image is dynamic and complementary, while also leading to misrepresentations. This chapter analyzes the synergistic association of several visual-textual examples from photojournalism to illustrate how images are easily manipulated and misunderstood. Metaliteracy is discussed as an empowering pedagogical response to these concerns that supports learners in developing detection and prevention strategies.

As part of his review for the co-authored book Metaliteracy: Reinventing Information Literacy to Empower Learners, Virtue concludes: “Mackey and Jacobson offer a foundational work that challenges how we understand literacy in the digital age. Furthermore, their argument for the need of metaliteracy is compelling. Metaliteracy is not only interesting but a necessary concept to understand the complexity of communication embedded within our continually evolving technologies—one that will help us, as teachers and librarians, help learners become more astute in their everyday lives.” We appreciate the thoughtful reviews by Drew Virtue and the support from Facet Publishing, the international publisher for both books in association with ALA Publishing in the United States.

Open Praxis is an open access journal that is published by the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE). This new research article examines the pedagogical dimensions of metaliteracy in three different MOOC environments, including the original connectivist Metaliteracy MOOC, followed by our Coursera MOOC Empowering Yourself in a Connected World, and the Canvas version, which integrates digital badging, Empowering Yourself as a Digital Citizen. Metaliteracy is examined in relation to connectivism as a pedagogical model for the development of learner-centered MOOCs that provide the necessary supports for success. We welcome feedback about this new collaborative essay and invite knowledge sharing related to your own MOOC journeys as either teacher or learner.

In an essay for The Conversation, entitled How we can learn to reject fake news in the digital world? Tom Mackey and Trudi Jacobson describe ways to challenge fake news through metaliteracy. The spread of fake news across social media presents us all with a reality check about the danger of deception in these spaces. As the authors describe in the article, fake news stories that appear to be easily accepted by online users is a problem that warrants a strong educational response through focused metaliterate teaching and learning. The same approaches outlined in the article address concerns about misinformation that is created and shared online as well. Several of metaliteracy’s learning goals and objectives speak directly to the situation we find ourselves in with a proliferation of fake news and misinformation online.

We are set to launch an on-demand version of our Cousera Metaliteracy MOOC entitled Metaliteracy: Empowering Yourself in a Connected World in December 2016! If you missed this MOOC the first time around or would like to discover this course for your own learning or as a resource for instruction, register now for this on-demand version taught by Tom Mackey, Trudi Jacobson, Kelsey O’Brien, Michele Forte, and Allyson Kaczmarek. This course will provide a dynamic exploration of metaliteracy through videos, animations, interviews, readings, and digital images, all developed by members of the metaliteracy learning collaborative from two schools within the State University of New York (SUNY), The University at Albany and Empire State College. Learners will participate in peer assessments and contribute to online discussions related to such topics as the metaliteracy model, creating and sharing information, understanding intellectual property and the ethical use of information, understanding how information is packaged and shared, participating as a global contributor, creating and curating information, and developing metacognitive reflection. While this course is focused primarily on metaliteracy, learners and teachers should also explore this MOOC as a way to support information literacy and related literacies such as digital literacy and media literacy. Register now for our December launch. Special thanks to Kelsey O’Brien for working closely with Coursera and our UAlbany/ESC team to transition the first version of this course into the on-demand format!